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Unfriending Someone, Before Facebook

I realized the other day that I had been quietly unfriended on Facebook and I could not help but think how much better things were 50 years ago, when a relationship went south and you knew why.

Let me give you an example of how the people in my family unfriended someone when I was growing up in the Catskills: It is summer and my favorite city cousin, whom we shall call Ravishing Rachel because of the delicacy of the situation, is in the mountains with a boyfriend. My mother gets a call that one of her brothers, Rachel’s father, has had a fatal heart attack. She is naturally distraught and, after calling a few motels, finally tracks down her niece and breaks it to her.

“Ravishing, you tramp!” I hear her holler. “Your father is dead and you killed him.”

See how much better that was than Facebook? No confusion, no wondering why or when it happened. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking: My mother was obviously the Emily Post of the Catskills, how many of us could hope to attain her command of language, her diplomacy and tact? It is amazing, you are thinking, that Jackie Kennedy didn’t ditch Letitia Baldrige and hire my mother to be her social secretary at the White House. And I would have to give you that. In my mother, one found a moral clarity that I think can only be compared to John Wayne, who unfriended people by shooting them dead.

Consider the grace with which my mother unfriended Cousin Marvin when he appeared on a summer day at our house:

“Marvin, I plain can’t stand you and nobody in the family can stand you. Stay at a motel.”

My grandmother Gussie, who conversed primarily in Yiddish and was so hazy about American customs that she understood Halloween to be a national holiday in which you give the children money, was a genius at terminating relationships. When someone, say Cousin Marvin, who just seemed to have one problem after another, got a divorce, a scandalous event at the time, my grandmother took out a pair of nail scissors and removed the face of Marvin’s ex-wife from the family photos, leaving for some reason the hair – well, Marvin’s wife did have very nice hair. She did the same thing with someone’s prom photos, after he had broken up with the girl. I kept expecting to see it in The National Enquirer: “Upstate Boy Takes Faceless Girl to Prom.”

I thought, as children do, this habit was particular only to my family, but later, I found out that my best friend’s grandmother, who also spoke only Yiddish and always made someone else turn on the television set because she thought it might explode, did the same thing. His grandmother was from Warsaw, mine was from a tiny shtetl in Russia, nobody gave them a pair of nail scissors when they got off the boat on Ellis Island and told them about unfriending and yet somehow they just knew. They were people ahead of their time.

Nor were your choices in those days only friend or unfriend. There were levels of unfriending culminating in that magnificent big gun, “dead to me,” a phrase my family wrapped their mouths around with a relish other people saved for steak.

Photo

Artie Wadler and friend, as she might have been unfriended had his mother disapproved, circa 1946.Credit
Photo Illustration by The New York Times

Dead to me was not achieved with a cowardly little click on the keyboard under cover of night. Dead to me took nerve, it took strength. It also wasn’t for children. You had to be an adult with a house and a job. You cleared a space in the conversation when a certain name came up – let’s use Marvin; waited three beats to make sure you had the attention of the house, and then, and only then, did you say, “He is dead to me.”

I have no choice here but to return to the master of the form, my mother. There came a time when she and her younger brother came to a fork in the road regarding religion, hers being our ancestral one, which eschews pork and enables us to write television comedy, my uncle’s newly adopted religion involving ringing doorbells and giving people pamphlets on Sundays. As he had moved to Los Angeles, this switch might have gone unnoticed but regrettably, one of his converts, returning home after visiting, was 13-year-old me.

My mother’s screams on the phone after she made this discovery are still remembered in Greene County. It remains one of the most powerful denunciations I have heard in my life.

“Aaron,” my mother said, “I never want to hear another word from you. You are dead to me.”

He remained dead to my mother for the rest of life, about 40 years, and from what I could see, she took great satisfaction from it. This was another reason unfriending someone before Facebook was so much better. You didn’t dispatch someone once and move on; you had a lifetime of satisfying moments in which you could unfriend them over and over again.

“I was going out to L.A. and I thought maybe I would look up Aaron, you know we were in the Army together --”

“Dead to me.”

With my cousin Ravishing, there was a much happier ending. One summer day, a few years after “your father is dead and you killed him,” we got a postcard from her with a photo of one of the grand Atlantic Ocean liners.

“Have run off and made a decent woman of myself,” she wrote. It was signed “Mrs.” And just like that she was refriended.